by David Park
She has slipped through the tightening clutch of her country’s history – she remembers how in the poem about Stalin he referred to his thick worm-like fingers – and despite everything somehow she has survived. There are those who will call it a miracle but she doesn’t believe in such things. She sits in a tiny room in a communal apartment surrounded by the little that she owns and smokes her cigarette. She glances around the room, austere as a monk’s cell. There are few books – it is still what Akhmatova likes to call the pre-Gutenberg era and what books that come into her possession are read and passed to others. Ideas and a smattering of new literature have still survived, if only in samizdat – precious scraps and manuscripts passed from trusted hand to hand. And she thinks she has the most precious of them all inside her if only someone will come for it. Surely someone will come soon, relieve her of this responsibility that she has carried for so long and before time succeeds in blunting the sharpness of her memory.
The smoke doesn’t clear any of the confusions she harbours. These are still dangerous times. Returnees come back every day, most barely recognisable as the men and women who entered the camps. They try to sift back silently into their lives and mostly never talk about what they have seen, in part because they fear that the telling will be held against them and lay themselves open to some new charge, but also because they cannot bring the terror and suffering back through words in case it finally destroys what’s left of them. And there are always those who whisper that there was no smoke without fire, that they’re not necessarily innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. But already she has heard of some people and some writers being rehabilitated so whatever her apprehensions she believes this is the road she must take.
When the day comes for her to go to the Writers’ Union she makes a special effort with her appearance, putting on what passes for her best clothes. It’s spring but she thinks herself too wise to allow herself to think of that as a portend, nor is there any great sense of change about to blossom – life feels as if it continues as it always has, although some of the hardships of the war years have ebbed away. But she takes some consolation at least from the birch trees beginning to swell towards leaf and the knowledge that she has survived what the worst of another winter could offer. It is a journey that she has made many times, often with him, but on this new day she is resolved not to go like a little mouse, not cap in hand for the doling out of meagre charity but with her head held high and looking them in the eye.
So it is her anger and her disdain for the parasites and lickspittles that weren’t worthy to be given the name of writers which fire her steps and stop her shaking inside as she enters the building that looks unchanged from before the war. But a man steps into the lift she must take just before the doors close. He looks at her, immediately recognises her and then glances away. It is Fadeyev. They are alone in the lift. She is used to being shunned by those who knew her and stares straight ahead. Fadeyev who cried when Osip read some of his poems to him in 1937 and on hearing of his death supposedly said, ‘We have done away with a great poet.’ But she carries other thoughts about him in her head and remembers his reaction when they had told him excitedly about being offered a temporary place in the Writers’ Union rest home in Samatikha – the place that was laid out as a trap for them and from where Osip could be quietly taken. It is obvious to her now that he knew the fate that would await them but was unwilling or powerless to warn them. She remembers his farewell embrace, his Judas kiss in response to Osip’s declaration that they would visit him on their return.
She stands in the lift with this man and the silent space between them seems stretched so tight and thin that it feels like it will break at any moment. The doors close, the lift begins to move. Only then does he shuffle closer and whisper in her ear, ‘It was Andreyev who handled the case.’ His breath smells of alcohol. Nothing more is said and when the doors open at the first floor he hurries out. So this is how it is to be now. What happened was always someone else’s doing. Perhaps they think it true because they need that self-justifying belief to survive, to go on living in the world and sleep soundly in their beds. She thinks of the newsreel films that showed German citizens forced to look at the horrors of the concentration camps and knows it will never happen here. And who can ever know the truth about whose name was on the bottom of the sentence during the terrors and if it hadn’t been this signature it would always have been some willing other. But one thing of which she is sure is that they will have no absolution from her, none of them.
She steps out into the corridor in which she has often been left to sit for hours on end and treated with scorn. She remembers one of the first times she came here with Osip, summoned by the censor who had taken objection to some early poem and the vitriolic treatment he had received and how as they walked away they heard him address a colleague loudly and obviously for their benefit, declaring that Osip was someone ‘who would have to be watched closely’ and whose views were ‘suspect’. She wonders again if it might not have been possible to carve out a different future from that moment but understands that it would have demanded a price that could never have been paid.
The secretary recognises her immediately and although there is no need to identify herself she straightens and says in as clear and steady a voice as she can muster, ‘I am Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam.’ She watches her scurry to inform Surkov of her presence and wonders how many hours she will have to wait but almost immediately he bounds out of his office and greets her with great politeness.
‘Terrible things have happened,’ he says as his greeting, wringing his hands as if the memory might be expunged. ‘What is your situation? Tell me your situation.’
She tells him about her desire to return to Moscow and the need for a teaching job. She listens to him burble on and in her head it sounds as if he’s talking about the past as a period of bad weather, a harsh winter, some almost natural playing out of the seasons.
‘Do you have the poems?’ he eventually asks and is almost disbelieving when she tells him she has them all.
‘They are preserved,’ is what she says proudly and if she could she would have the words echo through every room and corridor in the building that represented nothing more than a straitjacket for everything she holds dear.
She is almost tempted to believe that things have changed as she listens to him and there are hints of rehabilitation and a Moscow apartment to compensate for the one that was taken from them. What she does eventually get is a small widow’s pension and the securing of a teaching job in Cheboksary almost five hundred miles east of Moscow that had been previously denied to her. In the weeks that follow it slowly becomes obvious that the powers above him have poured cold water on his promises and she knows she will be forced to leave Moscow again. When she speaks to him on the phone or tries face to face she hears him increasingly use the meaningless, tightly circumspect language of the earlier years. The genie is back in the bottle. As a sop she is sent two hundred roubles and she satisfies her pride by using it to buy a copy of Osip’s Stone.
It feels like everything has supposedly changed but everything remains the same. She wants to believe that they are sincere when they speak of publishing him again but nothing occurs to make it a reality and she begins to doubt that it will happen in her lifetime. She receives a letter from the Prosecutor telling her that Osip has been cleared of the charges brought against him in 1938 but an application to have him exonerated relating to the poem about Stalin is rejected.
There is one more thing she must do before she has to leave the city, something important that fills her with equal uncertainty but to whose lingering questions she wants answers even though she knows they may tell her more than she is able to bear. Already she has heard stories about Osip’s last months in the camp from returnees, sometimes contradictory, sometimes hopelessly second or third hand, and others although fragmented carrying more semblance of truth. She feels it part of the act of preservi
ng that whatever truth exists should be known and so she gives herself to its pursuit.
Then on a prearranged day she journeys across the city to see a man who wants her to call him only by the name of Lev who has reluctantly, and only after patient weeks of reassurance, agreed to see her. He is a survivor, a returnee, whose name has come to her through a convoluted route. She finds the apartment block in the south of the city; it looks almost identical to the one in which she has taken temporary lodging but the lift is broken and she has to climb the stairs to the fifth floor. So when she knocks on the door she is a little breathless and when he opens it and while she is still introducing herself he is more interested in peering over her shoulder.
‘Were you followed here? Are you running from someone?’
She guesses he is in his late thirties, hollow-eyed and sunken-chested, withered to the bone, and already because she has seen it so often in the past she knows he has tuberculosis. Only a shock of black hair retains the vigour of his youth.
‘The lift is broken,’ she tells him and when she sees more reassurance is needed, ‘no one has followed me.’
Still he stares over her shoulder and then to confirm her words he walks to the stairwell and peers over. Even in that short distance she can hear the wheeze in his lungs, the insistent complaint of his breathing. A woman she assumes to be his wife comes to the door. She could pass for his daughter.
‘It’s all right,’ she says to them all. ‘I bring you no trouble. No trouble, I promise.’
In a gesture that contains no sign of conviction he invites her inside while he still checks the stairs and she enters a tidy room that compensates for its basic furnishing with a neatness and sense of order. A glass jar containing bluebells sits in the middle of the table. There is a small picture of Lenin on one wall but none of Stalin. She is invited to sit at the table but when she brings out a notebook and a pencil he tells her that he doesn’t want anything written down. Willing to agree with any condition he might impose she slips them away again and accepts the tea his wife offers her. She tries to break the ice by complimenting them on their apartment but it evokes little response and they continue to look at her with ill-concealed suspicion.
‘Osip has been cleared of the charges that sent him to the camps,’ she tells him and shows him the letter from the Prosecutor’s office. ‘And the source of whatever you tell me now will never be revealed.’
He stares at the letter and looks at her and she understands that the word of a stranger must count for little to a man who has endured and survived the worst the camps could offer and she can tell that despite his condition he is a true survivor. It’s something in the undiminished blue of his eyes, the way he sits straight-backed on the chair. And his hands that hold the letter are strong, strong and impeccably clean. She already knows that he’s not a talker and is glad of it because too often she’s had to meet with those whose versions of their encounter with Osip were garbled mishmashes of dates and places, spun out on endless tales of what they half-remembered and what they possibly imagined. And who is she to blame them when the camps destroyed any accurate concept of time and so many other human faculties? But from this survivor she already expects more and she reminds herself that he was a physicist in his former life and lets herself hope that she is talking to a man who still maintains some of the disciplines required by that profession.
‘So when did you first meet Osip?’ she asks but he holds his hand up to silence her, then wordlessly signals to his wife and she responds by getting a coat and with a simple bow of her head to their visitor leaves the apartment. He raises himself to his feet and for a second she thinks he too is about to go but he presses down on the splay of his fingers and then goes to a dresser and turns on the radio. It’s a mixture of folk songs and martial music. Then he sits opposite her again.
‘Things might be better now,’ he says, ‘but who can tell when the former things might return? I want to live my life for as long as possible. My wife’s never heard the truth about the camps although she asks often enough. What good would it do? Better in this world to know as little as possible. And are you sure you want to hear?’ He stares at her with unblinking eyes and she simply nods in reply and hopes that he can see that she too is strong.
‘I met your husband, the man they called ‘‘The Poet’’, in September 1938 on the transport train. I had been brought from Taganka, Osip and others I think from Butyrki. We travelled east to Vladivostok. The journey was bad but stepping into the transit camp for the first time was like stepping into hell. None of us could have imagined it even in our nightmares. It was badly overcrowded, conditions you wouldn’t keep animals in, lice everywhere, but because the weather hadn’t turned people hadn’t yet started fighting for places in the barracks. Even then there were people dying – some from disease, some because they simply gave up and chose not to live another day. And there were fights, I never saw such fights as I saw in the transit camp – a man could get his throat cut for a few crumbs of bread. The politicals weren’t supposed to be in with the criminals but they hadn’t sorted that yet. The most physically able were moved on to Kolyma to work on construction. Osip wasn’t ever going to be one of those.’
He pauses and looks at his hands before saying, ‘Right from the start he wasn’t well.’ Then he pauses again, this time for longer.
‘He had a weak heart,’ she offers.
‘He wasn’t well in the head,’ he tells her.
She nods to show she understands and that it’s all right for him to go on.
‘He had a problem with food – he thought they were trying to poison him and often he ended up giving food away. He had,’ he hesitates again, ‘a simple nature. People could take advantage of him. And already he looked like an old man. We all ended up looking like old men but he was old from the start. But he interested me and I talked with him, got to know him, and understood he had something that others didn’t. But he also wandered about too much and drew too much attention to himself just by being different. To survive in the camps firstly you need to want to more than anything else and despite everything you have to endure, to be single-minded about what it takes to survive and never draw attention to yourself. Be as close to invisible as possible – that’s what’s required. You understand?’
He stops, raises himself from the table again and goes into another room where she hears him spitting. Even the strident music coming from the radio can’t block out the wheeze of his chest as he returns.
‘I’ve never spoken to anyone about these things. It feels strange.’
She knows he still wants to cloak himself in invisibility, that it is only this in which he feels safe. She wants to tell him that they need voices who will be witnesses to what was done but she says nothing that will discourage him from telling her everything he knows.
His words are chosen carefully and he has no need for elaboration or stories whose purpose is to aggrandise himself or present himself as a saint. And there are times he calmly tells her of things he saw and had to do because his survival depended on it and he recounts them without either shame or pride. And she knows he’s telling her both about Osip and himself, the words released for the first time. When he pauses she pours him a glass of water and his hand shakes a little as he drinks. She looks at the little bunch of bluebells and thinks of all the unmarked graves, a whole generation swallowed up by the tundra. She is suddenly struck by the intense beauty of these most simple of flowers, the deep richness of the blue, even the green stems in the water. Her eyes hold them, for a moment oblivious to everything else until he continues speaking.
‘They wanted workers to go outside the camp to clear ground. I volunteered and took Osip with me. Strange to volunteer for work but it was worth it to get out of the camp that every day grew more crowded and into air and space that wasn’t polluted with every conceivable disease and human weakness. We moved a few stones about and he made a joke about his book of poems being called Stone. Was that really what it was c
alled? I remember thinking it was a strange name for poems.’
‘Yes, that’s what it was called,’ she says, her voice shaking a little because in that moment it feels as if she is standing once again beside her husband, so close that she can almost reach her arms out through the years. And with those hands she wants to strip him of the tattered rags he wears, dress him in love just as she was by Vasilisa Shklovski. Wants to take him from the bareness of that wooden bunk in some forsaken barracks full of disease and suffering and bear him away in the arms of her love, carry him high so there is no wire can stop him escaping to a world that exists forever beyond their reach. And let him see these bluebells, find the words to tell their story to the world and she will write the words on her heart. Let him breathe the air. Let him see these flowers. Let him live.
‘Later the weather changed, the rains came and then with them an outbreak of typhus. Prisoners got locked in their barracks and then those who were ill were placed in quarantine. Some used to believe that no one ever came back from quarantine. I got it but bluffed it out at first and then was taken first to quarantine and then to the infirmary. When I recovered I heard Osip was dead. I don’t think it was typhus but no one knew for sure. Perhaps his heart just gave out.’
He shrugs his shoulders as if to say that’s all he knows before he adds, ‘It’s not easy for you to hear but it was best for him. It meant he didn’t have to suffer any more, didn’t have to know what was waiting for him in Kolyma.’
She makes herself sit as straight-backed as he is then thanks him for everything he has told her and for the kindness he showed Osip. She asks a few simple questions and then understands as he grows restless that it’s time for her to go – she has no wish to inflict memories on this man for any longer than is necessary. She takes a deep breath and then stands. There is nothing she can give him except her thanks and he has that already so she shakes his hand, holding it for a few seconds longer than is normal.